"You are here as a witness," declares a sign on a wall in the back garden. A child's football lies abandoned in the long grass. Inside the house, a pregnant woman frantically cleans, her list of chores pinned up on a washing line across her kitchen, like penances. A child wanders from room to room like a silent ghost. In another room, an elderly woman tells of 40 years of fear, cracked ribs and broken teeth. Domestic abuse does not respect pearls or privilege.

One in four women experience domestic abuse. And it's not just women. In Common Wealth's Our Glass House, a site-specific performance staged in a private house on a housing estate on the margins of Edinburgh, a man talks of the woman he loves even though he bears the scars, both physical and emotional.

The show, based on interviews with women and men who have been abused, takes place in one house, but it stands for what happens in many houses across the UK. In one room, an Indian woman speaks in a language that, although I do not know it, is understood as the language of isolation and loneliness. Thumps and shouts echo from other rooms. Something unspeakable is happening in the bathroom. Someone is crooning that old Tom Jones hit: "Forgive men, Delilah, I just couldn't take any more." Sorry is a word that drops too easily from the lips of those who abuse.

The form of this piece inevitably means the play is a series of kaleidoscopic snapshots rather than a sustained story. The audience is given the freedom to wander around the house in a way that many who experience abuse cannot. Even so, the space feels tiny with so many of us crammed in, like the prison it is for its inhabitants, who are caught in lives and relationships from which escape seems impossible. Shattering.

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